The beginning of the 20th century brought incredible transformation in the lives of Ottoman Turkish women. They underwent one of the most brutal wars that had ever been experienced. Unlike women in other combatant countries, Turkish women felt the impact of continuous warfare for about a decade from the Balkan Wars in 1912 to the end of National Struggle in 1923. This decade marked by wars, social and political upheavals and changes made things worse for women while at the same time it created new opportunities. During World War I and especially afterwards, Turkish women’s clothing habits, fashions and their roles in the society transformed. Women gained further access to work life and education as compared to the prewar years. During this difficult period, together with positive changes, women experienced impoverishment, lost their male relatives, suffered state violence and the social impact of the war years. However, women were not passive observers of these changes in their lives. Their perception and subsequent action affected directly or indirectly the politics. Even during World War I, when mobilization forced women to sacrifice the most, ordinary women influenced the decisions of the politicians through their informal and everyday politics, which mostly was their daily survival struggles and resistance. This showed itself in their narratives in the petitions or telegrams they submitted to the state bureaucracy or in their literary works like poems or folk songs. Most importantly, ordinary women’s daily resistance forced the state authorities to modify their decisions or the laws regarding the mobilization. Covertly, but persistently, women shaped the conditions they lived in under the rule of even the most authoritative political leaders. This paper focuses on the different ways that Turkish women perceived the war, extreme poverty and gender reforms and their resistance to the negative changes in their lives at the beginning of the 20th century, with special emphasis on the years between 1914 and 1923, chaotic years which paved way for the radical nation-building reforms of the interwar period. It uses the methodological and theoretical approaches of the history from below, subaltern studies and history of everyday life (alltagsgeschichte) and new archival sources such as ordinary women’s petitions, telegrams, folk songs, poems, newspapers, periodicals, reports of the state bureaucracy on women’s problems, and laws concerning women. It aims to contribute to Ottoman Turkish women’s historiography by revealing the role of ordinary women.